What is Grok AI? Is It Worth the Hype?

Amid a sea of generative AI products, Grok AI sets itself apart with a bold and irreverent personality. Developed by Elon Musk’s xAI, Grok’s unconventional tone may make it less suitable for business use compared with its competitors. However, Grok still holds its own among the leading foundation models of today, boasting strong test performance and competitive speed.

What is Grok AI?

Grok AI is a large language model designed for generating, changing, or analyzing text. It also offers advanced generative AI capabilities, including internet search functionality and image creation, making it a versatile tool for various tasks.

Unlike standalone AI tools, Grok resides within X (formerly Twitter). To access it, users must log into X and purchase a subscription to Grok. This integration aligns Musk’s vision of transforming the social media platform into an “everything app,” where tools like Grok complement the platform’s ecosystem of services.

Additionally, Grok’s development is part of xAI’s larger mission to build AI systems with a distinct personality and edge, reflecting Musk’s intent to differentiate Grok from its more conventional competitors.

What are the key features of Grok AI?

“Grok is designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak,” the Grok team wrote in a blog post in November 2023. “A unique and fundamental advantage of Grok is that it has real-time knowledge of the world via the platform. It will also answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems.”

Web search and citations

Grok leverages X to deliver real-time answers about current events. Answers to questions related to the news or current events will show links to the source post or website next to the chat window.

Images

Grok generates images by using xAI’s Aurora, a separate video model.

Aurora is an autoregressive image generation model. Autoregressive refers to the statistical technique the model uses to predict what content is most likely to come next in a sequence. Unlike other AI models, Grok will create photorealistic images — a controversial capability, since it can be used to create deepfakes. Grok accepts prompts including copyrighted characters or politically inflammatory material.

X users might see the “draw me” feature, in which Grok will generate images based on information in that user’s profile. Facebook similarly introduced AI-generated images into the feed recently. This included images putting the user’s likeness in fantastical situations.

API

The API for Grok allows for function calling, a 128k context length, and system prompt support. It interoperates with OpenAI and Anthropic software development kits.

Who developed Grok AI?

xAI developed Grok. Musk founded and leads xAI, which was publicly announced in November 2023.

How does Grok AI compare to other AI chatbots like ChatGPT?

A major difference between Grok and other generative AI products, like ChatGPT or Llama, is that Grok operates entirely within the X social media platform. Grok will answer questions related to productivity, analyze text,and solve math and coding problems. It can also perform many of the other tasks generative AI can do for business. However, its data remains within the X platform.

xAI said the latest version of Grok, Grok 2, scored 87.5% on the MMLU benchmark. MMLU measures the ability to correctly answer natural language questions in academic disciplines including philosophy and mathematics. OpenAI said its o1 scores 92.3%. Meta said its Claude 3.5 Opus scored 86.8%.

SEE: Google Workspace subscriptions increased slightly as the Gemini AI became a default part of the package.

Is Grok AI free to use?

Grok AI is not free to use. It requires a subscription to X Premium or Premium+.

• Premium costs $8/month or $84/year on the web.
• Premium+ costs $22/month or $229/year on the web.

The Grok enterprise API costs $2 per 1 million input tokens and $10 per 1 million output tokens.

What are the privacy concerns associated with Grok AI?

Grok’s close association with X has raised concerns about the privacy of personal data on the platform, which may be fed into the AI. X posts are used to train Grok by default.

What is the controversy around Grok AI?

Musk’s control of Grok and X’s trend toward unlimited — including potentially offensive — content has led some to be weary of using Grok. xAI describes Grok as providing “unfiltered answers.”

During the November 2023 announcement of the model, xAI said: “Grok is designed to answer questions with a bit of wit and has a rebellious streak, so please don’t use it if you hate humor!”

In September 2024, the National Association of Secretaries of State alleged Grok contributed to election misinformation regarding the US presidential race. In response, X changed Grok’s responses such that questions about voting were redirected to a nonpartisan site, CanIVote.org.

Is Grok worth the hype?

We find it difficult to recommend Grok for business use cases. Its irreverent tone may make the content it produces inappropriate for general audiences, while heavy reliance on social media for information may make its answers potentially unreliable. Additionally, Grok is not accessible to people without an X account.

However, Grok’s irreverent tone may work for some content and audiences, and its placement on X may meet users where they already are. As noted above, Grok scores higher than Meta’s Claude and some versions of OpenAI’s GPT-4 on certain benchmarks. In particular, it holds its own when offering general knowledge and mathematics answers.